The Mystery of the Missing Process Performance Counter in Perfmon

One typical day I receive a request from a performance tester who is trying to collect some baseline production data about www.microsoft.com , the request seemed simple collect a couple of performance counter values during peak hours and post the data back to him . I started to collecting data from my machines. One of the counters that he was interested in was Process à Handle Count à w3wp. I could not find the process counter the counters what I had was as follows.

I quickly remembered about resource kit utility in win2k that was used to resolve this type of issue exctrlst.exe . Found a copy of it and copied it over to my 2k8 server not sure it would really work on 2k8 I decided to test my luck. I had a feeling that it was just a registry change so at the same time I started regmon on the server to capture registry changes.Launched the tool and selected the perfproc counter and check marked performance counters enabled.

Stopped regmon and filleted operation by regsetvalue Viola got it!!

Closed Perfmon and opened it again. Verified the perfmon to make sure the process counter showed up.

Now I know what it sets in registry so I did want to do this remotely.Quickly put through a for loop for the following command